Hardcore [A Zombie Apocalypse Isekai LitRPG]

Stu is an aging underachiever whose friends and family are always complaining about his lack of ambition. Perfectly content to spend his time playing video games, watching TV, and taking things easy, Stu ignores their complaints, breezing through life without a care in the world. This boring, breezy life comes to an end, however, when two mysterious men kidnap him and march him through a portal to another world -- a world similar to our own, but which happens to be in the throes of a zombie apocalypse. Thrust into this unbelievable new world, with very few resources and with very little understanding of the situation, Stu quickly finds himself struggling to survive...and struggling to come to grips with the strange "ICON" system, which has somehow been implanted in his brain. The system rewards him with special skills for killing zombies, but killing zombies is the last thing Stu wants to do. All he wants to do is go home. * * * Many years ago some friends of mine asked me to come up with a basic plot for an indie beat-em-up game they were thinking about making. We decided that the story would be about zombies -- it would follow the adventures of a hapless nerd named Stu, who sets out to rescue his favorite TV star in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The idea was, Stu would start out almost totally helpless, but after completing each level and learning a new skill from the crazy people he encountered (boxers, cops, backwoods survivalists, and so on) he would gradually become an over-the-top badass jumping his motorcycle over fiery pits while blasting zombies like Rambo or something. That was the basic premise of Hardcore. Unfortunately the video game project eventually fell through. I hung on to the idea, because I liked it, but I didn't know quite what to do with it -- it just didn't seem like a good fit for a prose novel. A video game, sure. A comic book, maybe. But a novel? But then this LitRPG boom hit, and I started thinking Hardcore might work as a prose novel after all. I brushed off my old outline, expanded it, changed a few things around, and started writing it. So! Here we go.